Rethinking the nexus between legality and violence in (il)liberal democracies

Shoshana Fine is Associate Professor of Political Science at the European School of Social and Political Sciences at Lille Catholic University and a Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations. She is co-author, with Thomas Lindemann, of La Violence au nom de la loi (Presses de Sciences Po, 2026) and author of Borders and Mobility in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her work on migration, borders, and the politics of law has appeared in Security Dialogue, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Cultures & Conflits, and Politique Européenne. Sara Dezalay is Professor of International Law and International Relations at ESPOL (Université catholique de Lille). Her research explores the entanglements between law, violence, and global capitalism. She is the author of Lawyering Imperial Encounters: Negotiating Africa’s Relationship with the World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2024/2025), which traces the role of law in shaping Africa’s position in global capitalism. Her recent work also investigates asylum justice and the everyday production of legal violence, building on her experience as an adjunct judge at the French National Court of Asylum (CNDA) and on an ethnographic research project on asylum adjudication funded by the Institut Robert Badinter. Thomas Lindemann, Agrégé in Political Science, is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin and at École Polytechnique. He has published numerous books and articles on political violence and recognition in journals such as Political Psychology, Review of International Studies, International Political Sociology, International Theory, International Relations, as well as Culture et Conflits and Revue Française de science politique. He is currently conducting research on the algotithmic mindset as a source of international violence.

• Introduction (Shoshana Fine and Thomas Lindemann).- From Procedural Violence to Attrition by Law: The Asylum Bar in France (Sara Dezalay).- Legal Engineering and the Government of Violence: The Western Intervention in Afghanistan (2001–2014) (Adam Baczko).- Hollowing out humanity? Exploring the hollowing out of the norm of search and rescue at sea in the Mediterranean (Chiara Ruffa).- Double-edged: the ambiguous status of contested states as a lens on states, law, and violence (Janis Grzybowski).- Law and Violence in Space: The Spatial Politics of Destruction and Reconstruction in Diyarbakır (Burcu Türkoğlu).- The mythological foundations of counter-terrorist lawfare and violence (Mathias Delori).- Making Sense of Iraq’s Destruction through Legal and Strategic Discourses (Christophe Wasinski).- The Poetics of Legal Infrastructure: How Legal Form Legitimates Migrant Deaths (Shoshana Fine).- Myth, Law, and Intervention: Walter Benjamin and the Violence of World Order (Dillon Stone Tatum).- Conclusion (Sara Dezalay).